Young Family’s Exquisite Handcrafted Tiny House with Creative Design Ideas

I'm Seth, this is Claire, and welcome to our tiny home. So we named it Kalorgen. It is 28 feet long by eight and a half feet wide. Chose to go as high as we could so it's like 13 and a half. So we chose to build it ourself from start to finish. We started with a notebook and started drawing different plans. Come on inside, let's go. All right, so first off, this is our other family member. This is Asa and Emery girl. So this is our awesome family of four. We live in this house. This side, we'll start on the side. This is our kind of like living area. This is a couch from Ikea. It folds into a bed. This little thing slides out, pops up, makes it a nice piece. I mean, it's like a clean size bed or so. It's pretty close to that. There's all kinds of storage under here. Yeah, this is like a little fold-up desk that I, we've been messing around with like where we put it, but we fold up here and then we can pull the chair over here and sit this way. And then our computer's on a swivel screen, so it's like a nice little desk working area. And then we also use that for our TV for like Netflix or whatever. So yeah, so we come over here, we have a cubic mini stove. Works fabulous. I can't say enough good things about it. Keeps our house 80 degrees, no problem. This is the Grizzly model as well. So we got the wall mount with it. And yes, it does get a little hot with the guitar, but I move it when the fire's on. This is our guest loft right now. As you can see, it has like some storage, some diapers, all kinds of stuff like that. But we will be moving into this loft eventually when the baby grows up a little bit. So cool. This is one of my favorite parts of our tiny home. This is one of my favorite parts of the build. It's a very creative stair set. There's a lot of stuff that's jam-packed in here. So what I'm going to do is like go through step-by-step. So the doggy door is pretty cool. It opens and closes like a normal doggy door. This is a little compartment for our game storage. We love hosting and having fun. And then this last step actually is a little step stool for Claire to reach up to the higher stuff and whatever. Actually, it houses my work boots because they're big and clunky. It's hard to store those somewhere. And then this little corner step folds up. It's like a little junk drawer for me. Like I have like little tools and random stuff in there. And then like coming around the corner here, we have this is our closet. A lot of people put their washer and dryer in here, but I wanted to get that out of the kitchen. And so this is like a his-hers closet. And we actually store our shoes and stuff underneath it. And the reason how we can do that is we found these higher hangers to cut out these things. So it lifts up your clothes off the ground a little bit farther. So it creates more space and more of a compact form. So that's kind of how we utilize that. And these are actually like recycled closet doors. They like the accordion doors that we just cut down and it ended up being the perfect size for us. So in here we got a little, every place needs a little junk drawer. So this is our little like junk drawer. It's like all falling out. And then so here I love coffee, do a lot of coffee stuff. So this is kind of like a little pour over station that I had come in. We store our keys. We have a KitchenAid that slides in there. We have a smaller KitchenAid. We don't need a big one. So it slides in there and then we just kind of like added some decorations, use some copper cabling and stuff like that. One thing to mention with all of our wood accents and stuff like this is all called Myrtle wood. So all of our handrails you'll see like all of our little stuff around is all called Myrtle from the Oregon coast. I used to work for a guitar company and they used it for their tone woods for their acoustic guitars. So it's pretty awesome wood. They rejected it because all these wormholes, but it gives more character. So it's pretty fun. All right. So as I was saying over here, like with our game storage, we love to entertain. And so one of the solutions for me, like we like try to figure out how do we get a dining room table or like just an entertainment area. And so this is one of our solutions that we found. One of our other tiny little friends had designed a Murphy table and I just love that idea. So what I did is I could incorporate the same wood as our countertops and everything. And we were able to be able to create a space for a huge entertainment center. So we can actually put five chairs around here. And as you see later on the tour, we have some extra storage for our extra seating and stuff like that. So, and so it's super nice that way. One other thing that I wanted a decent sized kitchen to be able to prep. And I didn't want to sacrifice that. Some people do like the horseshoe shaped kitchens and everything, but I really like to like compact it. And so this is another really cool way to make a really large kitchen. Now it's like a huge L-shaped kitchen, but yeah. So we'll just move on here. So this folds up here and then this pops in just like, so this is that same wood, myrtle wood, just super beautiful wood. I'm really proud of that. But anyways, we wanted to make an undermount sink so we can utilize the top as more counter space. So we can just move it around and it has to have more prepping area and all kinds of stuff like that. So it's an undermount sink, pretty easy to come in and out. You can use it as a cutting board or whatever, but actually we honestly don't do that. So our little cooking area, this is a salvaged RV stove. And so it's like a four burner stove. Oven works great. I honestly have no complaints about this stove at all. And it was nice because this thing flips up and gives you actually even more counter space. So that was a nice thing, nice find. I would highly recommend doing that. They're very efficient. We go through, we have two normal size propane tanks for like a grill. And then we go through, I mean, shoot, it's probably four months that we go through our propane and we use it for our hot water, showering and cooking. And it's just awesome. This is actually some fake tile. It's not real tile, but it actually has the texture and everything as real tile. So that was really nice. It flexes. It's very lightweight and it looks good too. It's very easy to clean. We have like dishes here, dish rack, even if we get crazy with our dishes and get lazy even more and we can put it over our sink. And then, so we just roll it up and set it up there. Works really well, really handy for like bigger pots and pans and stuff like that. This is my wife's idea is doing the spice racks here. She saw them somewhere on Instagram or something like that. One more thing that people ask, well, what do you do with your dog food? What do you do with all this other stuff? And so this is one of our solutions. So it's a little mess. Sorry about that. But we have our recycling in here or you can start water filters. And then this container here, big white container, it holds a full, big, full thing of dog food, which works outstanding. So yeah, that's a cool thing. Like a lot of people don't understand like the need for space inside of a kitchen. So one thing I did is I used a bathroom vanity and I got this out of the salvage yard as well and repainted it and everything. But it's actually 22 inches deep instead of 24 as a normal counter space. And I did the same exact thing on the other side to just maximize the walking space. So you're not buttoning into each other while you're walking past. One thing with a tiny home that I wanted to do is I noticed a lot of tiny homes using a full on cabinet for their utility room. And I just thought that was like a slightly wasted space. I know there's, there's some theories behind why they have so much space, but this is my solution to this. It's a little messy, forgive the mess, but pantry, full on drawers. We have tons of storage. And one of the things that I'm really proud of is I extended this cabinet out to match the height with the countertops. And then what I did is I can actually take all of this stuff out and access my utility closet. So I have my hot water on demand. We have our vacuum back there and down below is actually our electrical panel. So I'm just a good solution to kind of hide it because you don't access, you don't need to access it all the time. So just on random occasions. So yeah, so that's kind of my solution to going that route. So as you can see, nice and easy, it doesn't, it doesn't take much. So then we'll go over to this side. This side's kind of like, yeah, it morphs weekly. So what this section is, originally I designed this place as an office. So nice big window. It opens up like an audience. So you can like open it during a rainy season or something, but it was like supposed to be an office. Cause my wife's an accountant and stuff like this works from home. We actually use that as a kind of a changing table for our baby. Sometimes the crib, this actually has the same hinges as over on the other kitchen. And so this will actually fall down as well. And we will actually be putting in the baby crib right here as well. So this will be like the baby room as well. So the extra chairs, some of the extra chairs that we have are like on the ceiling up here. Yeah. I put the little like broom clips and I put four of them for each chair, just to hold them up there. Never had any issue with it. And it works really well. One thing that I actually, it was kind of like one of my flaws with the tiny home build is I forgot to put a light switch for this light. And so one little hack that I did is I cut it into wiring and I put a little switch up in, into the middle here and actually works really well. It was really space-saving and be able to get this four feet wide. So, so we're moving on to kind of the bathroom area. So this one, like I salvaged a this is a Alder, nutty Alder door. So we painted on one side and then left it natural on the other. And then I re-engineered kind of the barn door track system because if you would install it normally, you'd have like this three to four inch gap up here above your door. So I had to like kind of reverse it and stick the barn track up into our loft area a little bit. And then now it works pretty dang well. And so actually give us a little bit of room for like a little quote board. Yeah. And it works super, super well. So this is our one side of our bathroom. We went with a separate villa composting toilet. It works pretty dang well. It's it's yeah. I love, we went with it because it looks like a normal toilet. The functionality of the spinning bucket utilizing the space and it's very efficient. And then one thing that I wanted to do, as I mentioned earlier, is we wanted to get the laundry unit out of the kitchen. And so this is kind of my solution to build this like cabinet area for this. And we use our cloth diaper storage or baby blankets and swaddles and all kinds of stuff. And actually we use this for our personal closet as well. So we have our clothes and pants and this is basically all we use it for. That's, yeah. So that's all the clothes that we really have is between the two closets. And then, so one thing I did is I built it, like raised our washer and dryer up off the floor so we can get our laundry basket underneath here. And then we have like detergent and stuff like that underneath and just for other storage. Yeah. So like over here, you can see this big long mirror. I saw this on Pinterest or somewhere, somewhere to hide your brooms because we sweep a lot. So I inset a little cabinet for our brooms and Swiffer and yeah, it works awesome. On the other side is our shower. One thing I wanted to do is like, I wanted a decent shower. So this is actually a full on corner shower straight from Home Depot. So we actually, it's got a couple of things in here cause we keep some stuff a little organized, like wet stuff. But my wife's idea actually is this little swivel towel rack. So when we're not showering, we can put it in inside the shower. And when we're showering, we could swivel it out and it hides it and makes it useful. Yeah, we had, yeah, so pretty nice. One of the, a big issue that I had with our tiny home was our loft is above our bathroom. And so what I couldn't do is I couldn't put any exhaust vent above it or anything. And I didn't want to put it in the back of the house because eventually I want to build like a little shed up there with two big doors. So couldn't do that. And so this was, had a window over here, cabinet over here. So I didn't like customize a vent going outwards. And another cool little thought that we had is I'd put this on a humidity switch. So as you can say, it's a small house, small bathroom. So as we're taking a shower, which we try to take ship showers, so it's pretty quick and fast, but I'm actually don't want to have an issue with the humidity or anything, but if it ever did get too humid, that would kick on and yeah, get all the moisture out of here. So yeah, this is our little sink area. This is straight from Ikea. I recognize it. One thing that I've done to our bathroom, because we live in Colorado, it gets really cold in the winter time. So a lot of problems that a lot of places have is freezing pipes. So you don't really notice it, but since I'll tell you, you'll just know, is I actually built our walls on the inside of the bathroom, a little bit thicker so I can run all my plumbing and piping on the inside of the installation just to get that much more coverage with protection. Another thing for me personally, I hate cables. And so I wanted to hide my wife's straightener and hairdryer and all kinds of stuff. So I did this little like pop out a little cabinet. And so I actually installed a outlet inside there so I can, we can just put all of our cables inside. So that works quite nicely. By mentioning the use of wall space because of the, there's a little bit of space in there. I installed the little magazine rack, toilet paper thing into the wall as well. So you can actually get things off the floor or off the wall. So one thing that, another big thing that I wanted, I wanted some wall space to be able to put some pictures and everything else, but also want a lot of light and a lot windows. So we got creative with different wall windows and long skinny window to let some light in, a natural light. And I was able to do some decorations and stuff up here. And then like over here, I wanted to like more wall space to put thermostat, big canvas painting. I hang my guitars, all kinds of stuff. So that was really important for me. So this is our loft. It's 11 feet, I think you remember, max width. I wanted to be able to fit a king size bed if we ever wanted to get a king size, but also I wanted a little bit of storage up here too. So we have a six door dresser just on the other side here. And I wanted to put windows to make it feel open. So like wherever we were sitting in the loft or whatever direction we had the bed, I wanted to be able to look outside. That was just a big thing for me. I just wanted to not feel as like tight in a loft, I guess. I don't know. This window opens up as a bay window too. So it's super awesome for like rainy days. Put an outlet in each corner. That way, like wherever our bed's facing, we have an outlet or we can put a fan over there. But other than that, we just sleep up here. So there's not a lot to it. Hey guys, Alexis and Christian here with Tiny House Expedition. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe. And click left or right for more tiny house stories and tours.